Trial by fire

By John Elder and Winston Tan

February 10, 2008 — 11.00am

IN CHRISTIAN symbology, a face marked with ash denotes mourning, penitence and a faith in regeneration. So it turned out for Ranald Webster, the barely alive face of devastation 25 years ago: charred and swollen, like a pottery head left too long in the kiln. The smooth and empty features of a death mask.

Looking at a photograph of Webster lying in the hospital, you could see something of the 47 people who died in Victoria, the 28 in South Australia, consumed in the Ash Wednesday fires. He should have been among them.

One of the dead was Eddie Lowen: up at Cockatoo with Webster, not long-standing mates but close in the way of CFA volunteers. They were in a support van, parked on smouldering ground behind the front line, carrying a load of fuel, waiting for the tankers in need of resupply. They felt secure, the inferno having come and gone.

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"But then the wind changed, and it was like a glass furnace," says Webster, now 86 years old. "There was no sense of panic, we just had to get out of where we were."

Webster was at the wheel, no sight of the road through the smoke and flames. He was driving through the fire. He doesn't remember being upside down when the truck overturned. It was, he says, like a dream of disconnected moments.

"I had to crawl over all the gear in the back. I kicked out through the back door and climbed out into the middle of the fire. I thought Eddie was behind me," he says. But there was no saving Eddie.

Webster's head and hands were aflame. "I had to run a couple of hundred yards on fire down to the road. There happened to be a fire hose left running on the road and I put myself out with that. Then when the milk tanker came down, we hid behind that until the fire blew past, and went down to the Cockatoo fire station."

This matter-of-fact way of telling it gives the story the oddness and unreality of a dream. But it makes sense, given these are the memories of a man who was deathly ill at the time. "I always felt I was going to make it … but not many other people around me felt the same way," he says now.

Ambulance driver Lance Simmons remembers being called to the fire station to evacuate two severely burnt people. "We got as far as Avonsleigh and the road was blocked. We had a quick discussion with fire services and they suggested we go through Woori Yallock and they would hose us down as we went in. It was unbelievable. You could hear the roar of the fire. One minute it was burning on one side of the road. The next minute it exploded on to the other. It was very intense."

When Simmons saw Webster, he didn't expect him to survive. "He was conscious but his face was so swollen he could barely communicate. He had burns to 70% to 80% of his body. We loaded them up, put some IV fluids up, and got them out of Cockatoo."

Depositing the patients at Dandenong Hospital, Simmons drove back to the smoke-choked hills, ferrying people down through the night and into the next morning.

Two years ago, Simmons was watching a television special featuring Webster's new life as a walking comfort to despairing burns victims. He was surprised to see Webster alive. "I honestly thought he would have died."

Webster visits the burns unit at The Alfred hospital, sharing his clues for emotional survival and showing off the photographs of himself when his head was burnt black. He bids these people in the worst pain to see the future in his smiling, grandfatherly face and not in the wreckage snapshots. "I'm no oil painting, but I don't have any scars," he says.

Webster's wife of 63 years, Rae, remembers seeing her husband in the hospital for the first time. The doctors had told her not to come. "I don't know if I actually collapsed, but I know they (the nurses) took me out," she says.

Simmons didn't recognise the Ranald Webster on the television. It had been 23 years since he'd carried him to the hospital. He picked up the phone, went hunting. They met up, talked over the horror of the long-ago day and how their lives had turned out.

For Simmons, it was a matter of sticking to the life he'd made for himself. His ambulance partner on the day quit soon after: he'd seen enough horror and didn't want to see it again. Simmons, now 56, is still with the service.

Webster's return to an active life was built on patience and Christian faith. For three months he lay in a hospital bed with third-degree burns to his legs, arms and face. Then came years of gruelling rehabilitation: five days a week for the first 12 months.

Throughout the recovery he was thinking he'd been spared for a purpose. "There is no doubt in my mind how I got out of that situation … it was so I could go on to help as many people as possible."

Aside from his counselling work at the burns unit, Webster is involved with the Red Cross, Vision Australia and, of late, the Kids Foundation, which has a burns survivors' program. "Up until now I've only worked with adults. Working with children is going to be very special," he says.

As The Sunday Age discovered over the past two weeks of talking to Ash Wednesday survivors, restoration comes in many forms.

Brenda Hopkins was sitting down to chops and salad with two of her daughters when her husband arrived home, saying they had to leave immediately. They were in Upper Beaconsfield, the wind had changed. Seventeen firefighters were being killed. The Hopkins family rounded up their pets, put them in the car. But their oldest daughter was still driving home from work. "We didn't know where she was and she didn't know where we were," Brenda Hopkins says.

She remembers the night in a Pakenham hall, the relief of overnight rain, and the reunion with her daughter the following day. The Hopkins revisited their property to find their home no longer there. It was smouldering in the wet. The windows had melted, with remnants of glass on the window frames looking like icicles. Friends and family tried desperately to salvage what was left. There was little that could be saved. But she could still see where everything was. Where that ornament was. Where those old tins of food in the cupboard were.

The Hopkins have since rebuilt, just down the hill from where they originally lived. Brenda, 60, is still active with the Country Women's Association, one of the local groups that worked hard to put the community back together again.

Bert and Laura Levens also lost their home in Upper Beaconsfield. They built a new place, just about fireproof, half-buried in the ground. They're now in their 80s, and still love the bush. They remember how so many good people gave of themselves after the fire, the generosity and sense of being cared for. "There were donations from all over the world," says Laura Levens.

They also remember the strange workings of fate. Bert Levens tells the story of a bloke nearby who had been banished to the family caravan by his wife for having one too many drinks. "On the day of the fire … he slept right through it."

The man's house had gone, but the caravan managed to survive.

Ken Taylor had a beautiful home, Tanah Merah on Mt Macedon. It was wiped out in the first waves of fires more than a week before Ash Wednesday. Forty per cent of the heritage gardens were also destroyed. The poet and filmmaker was away at the time. His daughters put up a brave defence. They met him at the airport but couldn't tell him how bad it was.

He camped there in a tent. On the night of Ash Wednesday, he remembers the traffic slowly moving up the hill past his gate, refugees.

It took Taylor a couple of months to realise the full extent of his loss, most horribly his life's work: journals from his time forming the ABC's natural history unit, chronicles of his travels to the ends of the earth. He hit the road to make a film about cranes. His son built him a new house, but Taylor was unable to settle.

In 2000, he wrote a book of poems, Africa, voicing a grief he found hard to shake: "Now hear the hollow hills/now walk on shards." The book was his first published work in 15 years and it won him the NSW Kenneth Slessor poetry prize.

His restoration is nearly complete. This weekend, he's walking on a South Australian beach, thinking through the last few hundred words of a new book: it's about his early years with the natural history unit. Having lost his written memories and field notes in the journals, Taylor's friends and colleagues rallied around to fill in the blanks.